by Kelly Pickerill
Lemuria welcomes back Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler Tuesday evening to sign and to read from his new novel, A Small Hotel.
His last visit was in 2009 for the novel Hell, a tongue-in-cheek romp through an underworld which is populated, it seems, by everybody who’s anybody, including Anne Boleyn, Humphrey Bogart, Shakespeare, and Dante’s Beatrice. His two books before that, Severance and Intercourse, were comprised of vignettes examining, respectively, the last thoughts of just-lopped heads, and the fevered thoughts of couples while they, well, couple. In these collections, like in Hell, Butler let his imagination play with the details of well-known lives.
His new book, though, is a departure from these entirely. A Small Hotel is a look back at a marriage from the vantage point of its ending, and its characters are nobody we recognize. It’s the day Michael and Kelly Hays, who met in New Orleans twenty-five years ago when he saved her from some drunk ruffians, are finalizing their divorce, though Kelly doesn’t show up at the courthouse to sign the papers. 
Instead, armed with bottles of scotch and pills, she drives to New Orleans to the Olivier House, to the same room in the hotel where she and Michael spent their first night together, and to where they have returned many joyful times since. It’s been a place of happy nostalgia for the Hays couple, but for Kelly, on this day, it’s a place of despair.
Through his and hers flashbacks, seamlessly slipped into and out of as the characters go through a single day, Butler reveals the fissures in the couple’s relationship. If this basic plot description sounds quite gloomy, I actually found the novel to be too full of insight into relationships to be depressing. Michael and Kelly for twenty-four years have participated in that most vulnerable of relationships, a marriage, each trusting that their spouse understands implicitly their intentions, feelings, and thoughts, and each has ended up realizing that they’ve been completely misunderstood.
So I take it back that we don’t recognize the characters in A Small Hotel. They remind us of ourselves, of course.
Mr. Butler will sign and read at Lemuria on Tuesday, the 13th of September, beginning at 5 pm. To order a signed copy of A Small Hotel, click here.
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